The vulnerability of corn matters because it’s the industrial food stock of American life. Processed foods, from breakfast cereals to ice cream, are saturated in corn syrup. Corn is also a prime feedstock for animals, which have themselves been engineered to ingest and digest huge amounts of corn and transform it into animal protein. In this sense, a McDonald’s hamburger is better thought of as a McDonald’s corn burger. Corn fuels your trip to McDonald’s, too. More than half the corn grown in Iowa actually ends up as ethanol, which is mixed with gasoline and is an essential ingredient in fuel.
